More Guns Less Crime by John Jr (ebook reader macos .txt) 📗

because those most vulnerable to crime may be more likely to take actions to protect themselves. Depending upon how responsive victims are to these threats, the coefficient for a variable like the percent of young males in the population could be zero even when the group in question poses a large criminal threat.

19. Edward L. Glaeser and Bruce Sacerdote, "Why Is There More Crime in Cities?" Harvard University working paper, Nov. 14, 1995.

20. For a discussion of the relationship between income and crime, see John R. Lott, Jr., "A Transaction-Costs Explanation for Why the Poor Are More Likely to Commit Crime," Journal of Legal Studies 19 (Jan. 1990): 243-45.

21. A brief survey of the laws, excluding the changes in the rules regarding permits, reveals the following: Alabama made no significant changes in these laws during the period. Connecticut law gradually changed its wording from "criminal use" to "criminal possession" from 1986 to 1994. Florida has the most extensive description of penalties; the

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same basic law (790.161) persists throughout the years. An additional law (790.07) appeared only in 1986. In Georgia, a law (16-11-106) that does not appear in the 1986 edition appears in the 1989 and 1994 editions. The law involves possession of a firearm during commission of a crime and specifies the associated penalties. Because this legal change might have occurred at the same time as the 1989 changes in the rules regarding permits, I used a Lexis search to check the legislative history of 16-11-106 and found that the laws were last changed in 1987, two years before the permit rules were changed (Official Code of Georgia, Annotated, at 16-11-106 [1996]). Idaho has made no significant changes over time. In Indiana and Maine no significant changes occurred in these laws during the period. In Mississippi, Law 97-37-1 talks explicitly about penalties. It appears in the 1986 version but not in the 1989 or the 1994 versions. Montana enacted some changes in punishments related to unauthorized carrying of concealed weapons, but no changes in the punishment for using a weapon in a crime. New Hampshire, North Dakota, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Washington made no significant changes in these laws during period. In South Dakota, Law 22-14-13, which specifies penalties for commission of a felony while armed, appears in 1986 but not 1989. In Vermont, Section 4005, which outlines the penalties for carrying a gun when committing a felony, appears in 1986 but not in 1989 or 1994. Virginia and Washington made no significant changes in these laws during the period. West Virginia had Law 67-7-12 on the books in 1994, but not in the earlier versions. It involves punishment for endangerment with firearms. Removing Georgia from the sample, which was the only state that enacted changes in its gun laws near the year that the "shall-issue" law went into affect, eliminates the chance that the other changes in gun laws might affect my results and does not appreciably alter those results.

22. Thomas B. Marvelland Carlisle E. Moody, "The Impact of Enhanced Prison Terms for Felonies Committed with Guns," Criminology 33 (May 1995): 247, 258-61.

23. Marvell and Moody's findings (see note 22 above) show that the shortest time period between these sentencing enhancements and changes in concealed-weapon laws is seven years (Pennsylvania). Twenty-six states passed their enhancement laws prior to the beginning of my sample period, and only four states passed such laws after 1981. Maine, which implemented its concealed-handgun law in 1985, passed its sentencing-enhancement laws in 1971.

24. The states that had waiting periods prior to the beginning of the sample are Alabama, California, Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota, New Jersey, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Washington, and Wisconsin. The District of Columbia also had a waiting period prior to the beginning of my sample. The states that adopted this rule during the sample period are Hawaii, Indiana, Iowa, Missouri, Oregon, and Virginia.

CHAPTERFOUR

1. More precisely, it is the percentage of a one-standard-deviation change in the crime rate that can be explained by a one-standard-deviation change in the endogenous variable.

2. All the results are reported for the higher threshold required with a two-tailed t-test.

3. One possible concern with these initial results arises from my use of an aggregate public-policy variable (state right-to-carry laws) on county-level data. See Bruce C. Greenwald, "A General Analysis of the Bias in the Estimated Standard Errors of Least Squares Coefficients," Journal of Econometrics 22 (Aug. 1983): 323—38; and Brent R. Moulton, "An Illustration of a Pitfall in Estimating the Effects of Aggregate Variables on Micro Units," Review of Economics and Statistics 72 (1990): 334. Moulton writes, "If disturbances are correlated within the groupings that are used to merge aggregate with micro data, however, then even small levels of correlation can cause the standard errors from the ordinary

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least squares (OLS) to be seriously biased downward." Yet this should not really be a concern here because of my use of dummy variables for all the counties, which is equivalent to using state dummies as well as county dummies for all but one of the counties within each state. Using these dummy variables thus allows us to control for any disturbances that are correlated within any individual state. The regressions discussed in table 4.2 reestimate the specifications shown in table 4.1 but also include state dummies that are interacted with a time trend. This should thus not only control for any disturbances that are correlated with the states, but also for any disturbances that are correlated within a state over time. Finally, while right-to-carry laws are almost always statewide laws, there is one exception. Pennsylvania partially exempted its largest county (Philadelphia) from the law when it was passed in 1989, and it remained exempt from the law during the rest of the